After the Avalanche: Life as an Adventure Photographer With PTSD (Part 3)

After surviving an avalanche in 2011, photographer Cory Richard's world began to fall apart. Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, he found that the only escape from the struggles of daily life was the adrenaline rush of a good adventure.

The National Geographic Live series brings thought-provoking presentations by today’s leading explorers, scientists, photographers, and performing artists right to you. Each presentation is filmed in front of a live audience at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C.

I went back, to Africa this time. Exploration had taken on a different modality here. We were gonna explore the upper headwaters of the Okavongo, the Quito river catchment that flows out of the Angolan highlands. Steve Boyes, another NG explorer, took us to the Angolan highlands after basically 30 years of civil war, 15 years of peace at this point, to study this unexplored river catchment. One of the reasons it's still unexplored is because after wars, there are remnants and land mines are one of those. What happens here is that these areas are kept off limits by the land mines. It's a very tragic catch-22, and as soon as the land mines are cleared, people move in immediately, right? And the first thing they do is they cut down all the trees, and when they cut down all the trees, they use that for charcoal, then they plant cassava, which lasts about three years, maybe, and then you've got basically a dead plot of land, so you're left between, well, do we leave the land mines in? Of course, you can't do that, but as soon as you do it, you look at massive deforestation, and that's happening all the time. There's no clearcut answer. This is the headwaters. We were doing what's called a source to sand because the delta, or the water of the delta actually doesn't flow to an ocean; it's very unusual. Every year, the delta itself in Botswana floods with 11 cubit kilometers of water. It's the beating heart of southern Africa. When it floods, all the migrations come in. When it dries up, disperse, and it's very important for southern Africa, so this is the source. The idea was to put on mokoros, or dugout canoes, on that river flowing out of the bottom and float the entire length. There was not enough water to float. It was good for me at the time. I was feeling so much anger and pain and confusion, I'd just get in the water with crocodiles and just start chopping at stuff. People were like, "Cory, don't chop at that. "You're going upstream." I'm like, oh, okay, turn around. Anyway, you know, we had this opportunity to finally put the mokoros in the water and float them, and this is what it looked like in those upper regions. You can see the mokoros down in the bottom of the frame, this crystal water, but it was slow going. On the right side here is a burned section. On the left is a healthy section. The right side is where people have come in and burned it down to flush game and hopefully regenerate. Unfortunately, all that does is it destroys the root structure, and when it rains, it pushes more sand into the river, destroying the flow. We were also looking at these huge blockages. It was drudgery, it was cutting through these things. I mean, we're in the water with crocodiles, snakes, blisters, heat stroke, all of the things that make exploration really not fun at all, and this is days upon days, and why do you do this? That becomes the question, and the answer is, I mean, you have to do it. We have to understand these landscapes because so many people and animals and plants are connected to them. We're all connected, right? We have to care for each other, so exploration becomes about showing why it's important. What we found, six new to science species of fishes, dozens of new flora, reptiles. We were creating a holistic story of the river catchment and we found the most bio-diverse unexplored corridor on Earth. These were the first people that didn't run from us, which makes sense. Why would you not run from 12 white dudes on mokoros? Not a good sight to see, but these people were concerned. They were concerned that the government didn't know they were there, and quite rightly so. The government didn't know they were there. The government hadn't been there in 40 years. The last time was soldiers passing through, and what I started to realize was that their concerns in the bush were no different than the concerns of the people in Rwanda, the capital city. This is a very oil-rich place, and there is enough money to create a collective well-being in this country, but everybody's concerned about their own well-being because the country itself is concerned about resources, so as the oil prices, as the oil crunch happens, water becomes sort of a focus because it can be used for all sorts of things, hydroelectricity, mineral extraction, there's all sorts of things that this water can be used for, and everybody's concerns are the same. What happens to our water? This was really a story about water, not about just one river, not just about the delta, at least not for me. This is a story about what happens to the artisanal fisheries after overfishing with industrial fishing, what happens to subsistence fishing, what happens when governments think first of resources and how does that affect us downstream? And it's not just us, it's not just humans, we know that. It's big cats, and we have a Big Cat Initiative. It's the water that feeds the big cats. It's the aquatic life. It's everything from the crocs to the fishes to the algae to the grass, right? Goes all the way down. To the megafauna, the elephants, the hippos, the rhinos, the buffalo, all of it, all the way down to the absolute tiniest, the termites. All of this is this interconnected web, and the story doesn't stop and start with one system. It expands beyond it, and where do we fit in in there? How does the human element come to play? Because these people, the sand people, don't exist anymore. This is for tourism; they dress up and show tourists what it used to be like. In fact, Chris Johns, who's sitting right here, did one of the last stories when this was actually genuine, and so it's stopped since then, so what's happened? The only thing I can think of was a Norman Maclean quote, and it's very simple. Eventually, all things merge into one and a river runs through it, and I think that's very poignant when I move forward here. This is the last sad picture of my wife I'm gonna show you, but I want to just talk briefly about it. It was funny, in all of my assignments, it's only when I totally give myself up to it, when I totally give myself over to it, when I surrender, do I actually start to see, and it was the same with my marriage. Only when I totally surrendered, only when she totally surrendered, did we actually see each other for who we were, but by that time, it was too late. We burned things down and hopefully, they regrow. It was serendipitous that this last spring, my sponsor, Eddie Bauer, asked if I would like to return to the mountains, the place where this fracture started, the place where the avalanche had taken my life and done that with it, and I said, of course. I'd love to go back to the mountains. Where are we going? Everest. Okay, that sounds like a plan. I'm excited to go back and try to reconcile all of this, although I wasn't really thinking that at the time, but I knew I had to go back, I knew I had to go back to the mountains, and I know, trust me, I know it's self-indulgent for me, a white American male to go back to Everest to try to figure my (bleep) out, like, come on. Stick with me, don't walk out yet. I went back with a guy named Adrian Ballinger and the goal was to try to climb Everest without oxygen. I didn't go as a photographer. We were using, as Alice mentioned, Snapchat. We were doing something called EverestNoFilter, and we were bringing people along up Everest as we climbed it, and we had classrooms checking in with us, talking about physiology and altitude and geography. It was a very, very cool experience to watch it sort of grow organically. We just wanted to take people along and show what it was like to actually be on a real expedition. So I took very few photos. This is actually one of the ones that I really loved and there aren't that many. In fact, I'm only gonna show you four, and this is the last one. This is at 28,950 feet, so just about 100 feet, vertical feet below Everest's summit on May 24th, 2016, and Adrian had turned around much earlier in the morning, and I was alone, I had just passed these guys. That's right, I passed people without oxygen, it's cool. I'm not arrogant, what? I just passed 'em and I turned around and I looked back and I knew I was gonna be on the summit alone, which is very rare, vanishingly rare for Everest these days. I knew I was gonna be up there by myself, and when I got there, I cried for a second 'cause I'm a crier, and I stood up as tall as I could and I just reached up into space 'cause that's as close as I'm ever gonna get. I'm not gonna go back and be an astronaut, and at the time, I thought, you know, maybe this is the punctuation, maybe this is the end. Maybe this is the end of the darkness. I've climbed my way out; I was the phoenix rising. I've now proven that I can overcome anything and that is, you know, I'm good, done. Put a stamp on it, send it away, and what actually happened, and I didn't know it at the time was that was the point where my biggest lesson was to come, that I can run from everything, and I'm good at it, and we all are. I can run as hard and as far and as fast from the things, my demons that bother me, that eat me inside, I can go to the top of the (bleeping) world and they're right there with me, and that is a collective human experience. We cannot run from our issues, ever. The point is to turn into them and face 'em. That's what we have to do. You can go there, and they're still right there with you. So, you know, my life has never been normal. I started in these mountains and that's what brought me up. I'm not a particularly talented human, but I'm willing to try and keep going. It's hard work, it's not about, I take out a camera and I get a perfect picture. It doesn't work that way. Chris knows that better than anybody. It is one of the hardest things that you can do. I started with the mountains, and the mountains brought me to adventure, and adventure and exploration started to change the way I saw the world. I didn't care as much about this as I cared about this, what's happening to the planet, so this exploration gave me a different lens through which to view it, and what I've learned from this is that we're looking for solutions. Humans are looking for solutions. We want answers to everything. How do we stop this, how do we stop that? What do we do, what are the solutions for climate change? And know that those solutions are different than the solutions for the global corrosion of culture. They're very, very different. How do we solve that? And those solutions are different than the ones we need for conflicts. How do we deal with that? And of course, those solutions are very different than those that we need to help those that are affected by conflict, former child soldiers, areas like Aleppo. How do we deal with that? What are the solutions? There's a lot of questions facing our world right now, and there aren't any real clear answers. One thing that I believe is that we are all tied together, and by all tied together, I'm not talking about a hippie oneness of the world. I'm talking about physically, everything relies on everything else. It really does, in our day to day lives, and we need to pay more attention to that. How do we honor that bond? 'Cause we will find solutions. We are very, very good at finding solutions. That's what humans do. We have very big brains and we put band-aids on things. As a generalist, my goal with my photography is not to focus on one thing. I don't wanna be great at one thing. I wanna tell multiple stories through multiple different voices and lenses. I wanna step back. I wanna ask the question, not how do we solve the problems we have? How do we stop creating the problems? What's the answer to that? Why do I get up here and talk about divorce and PTSD and infidelity and adventure and confuse the whole topic? I mean, I've talked about alcoholism, I've talked about sustainability. You guys are like, what is the through line? I mean, I get it, dude, but what is the through line? Where are you going with this? The through line is this. We are the stewards, and every single choice we make has a consequence, every single one, and that is very important to remember. I'm 35 years old; I don't have the answers. I can tell you to ride bikes. I can tell you to eat less meat. I can tell you to take shorter showers. I can tell you to not use plastic bags. Don't use straws, you know. Buy a Prius, whatever you can do. You guys know that. We do need initiatives like Pristine Seas. We do need initiatives like Big Cats. We do need to focus that, but those honestly are band-aids on existing wounds, so what is the virus and how do we address that? And honestly, honestly, I think the answer is much, much simpler than we're making it, but I'm not audacious enough to say that, so I'm gonna let somebody else say it in different words. He's a little smarter than me, not much. You might've heard of him; his name's Carl Sagan. Anyway, that little dot there, if you haven't seen this before, this photograph is called the Pale Blue Dot, and that dot in that sunbeam is us, that's Earth. That was taken from 3.7 billion miles away in February 14, 1990, and this is what Carl, my buddy Carl had to say about this. "Look again at that dot. "That's here, that's home, that's us. "On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, "everyone you've ever heard of, "every human being who ever was lived out their lives. "The aggregate of our joy and suffering, "thousands of confident religions, "ideologies and economic doctrines. "Every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, "every creator and destroyer of civilization, "every king and peasant, every young couple in love, "every mother and father, hopeful child, "inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, "every corrupt politician, every superstar, "every supreme leader, every saint and sinner "in the history of our species lived there, "on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. "The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. "Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants "of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable "inhabitants of some other corner, "how frequent their misunderstandings, "how eager they are to kill one another, "how fervent their hatreds. "Think of the rivers of blood spilled "by all those generals and emperors "so that in glory and triumph, they could become "the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. "Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, "the delusion that we have some privileged position "in the universe are challenged by this point of pale light. "Our planet is a lonely speck "in the great enveloping cosmic dark. "In our obscurity, in all this vastness, "there is no hint that help will come "from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. "The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. "There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, "to which our species could migrate. "Visit, yes, settle, not yet. "Like it or not, for the moment, "the Earth is where we make our stand. "It has been said that astronomy is "a humbling and character-building experience. "There is perhaps no better demonstration "of the folly of human conceits "than this distant image of our tiny world. "To me, it underscores our responsibility "to deal more kindly with one another, "and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, "the only home we've ever known." Now, think about that for a second. Carl Sagan was pretty smart, but he didn't end with policy. He didn't end with carbon emissions. He didn't end with rainforests. He didn't end with any of that 'cause those are the wounds. That's what's happened. He ended with kindness. It's the most simple thing, because when we act kindly towards one another, in this city especially right now, when we act kindly towards one another, we hear each other, we treat each other with respect. We might not agree, and when there are abuses, we stand up for them, but we treat each other with kindness and respect, and the root of that, dare I say it as 35 year old man who's done all sorts of horrible things, the root of that is the one thing that makes us different as an animal. It's the single most important thing we do. It's unique to us, and that is love. That's what we do, and that, in and of itself, is where we start. So without saying too much more, I love you guys very much and thank you for sharing this with me.

After the Avalanche: Life as an Adventure Photographer With PTSD (Part 3)

After surviving an avalanche in 2011, photographer Cory Richard's world began to fall apart. Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, he found that the only escape from the struggles of daily life was the adrenaline rush of a good adventure.

The National Geographic Live series brings thought-provoking presentations by today’s leading explorers, scientists, photographers, and performing artists right to you. Each presentation is filmed in front of a live audience at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C.